Best Time Travel Movies

An excellent sequel to the original series episode "Metamorphosis."

Source Code, while an excellent movie that even deserves a thread of its own, is more alternate reality than time travel.

Planet of the Apes is certainly time travel, since the centuries that have passed on Earth are reduced to one year on the ship by relativistic time dilation, which, for some reason, the film labels, "Dr. Hesslein's theory."

A very interesting episode and really fabulous for its time.

I was about to put on the late news, when an episode of Twilight Zone came on: The owner of a time machine appeared to be portrayed by the man who played the professor on Gilligan's Island. His machine dipped into the old west and plucked up a man who was in the process of getting hanged. So close was the cowboy to death, he had rope burns around his neck. Pretty good episode, I thought.

All right, contrex, I give up--for all of us rude colonials who have absolutely no idea, what is a Bromley accent like. For that matter, what and where is Bromley, and why does it have its own accent?

Basically Mcdowell sounded too posh.

Russell Johnson was the scientist and Albert Salmi the 19th century criminal who was unable to hide his criminality in any era. It was a memorable episode.

There was another good Twilight Zone episode about time travel starring Cliff Robertson as a man driving his wagon train across the plains whose son gets sick. He rides on ahead to see if he can find something to cure him and finds himself in the 20th century.

Right. HG Wells was not born into the upper classes. His mother slated him to be apprenticed to a funeral director, but he refused and, through his own efforts, raised his station in life.

Another "Twilight Zone" episode that stayed with me since I was a kid, is "The Last Flight", a WWI fighter pilot deserts his comrade in a dogfight where they were outnumbered seven to two by the Germans,and escapes into a strange cloud, which mysteriously transports him to the sky above a 1959 jet base overseas. They interrogate him and he discovers the pilot he deserted is still alive and saved thousands of people in WWII. He realizes he's been given a second chance to atone for his cowardice, escapes, and flies back into the cloud to go back to 1917, save his friend, and change history, which he does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Flight_(The_Twilight_Zone)

Yeah, and in the process he abused women constantly, cheated on his wife, seduced young women and very likely committed a blatant act of plagiarism with The Outline of History. Yeah, he was a great guy.

As a plagiarist, if he was one, he stands in august company: Martin Luther King Jr (his own university admits that his doctoral thesis, the very foundation of his career, was significantly plagiarized. Seriously. They had an official inquiry and everything.) The staff of the King Paper's Project at Stanford even admits that, "King's plagiarism was a general pattern evident in nearly all of his academic writings". TS Eliot (famous for bragging about his rampant copying), Joe Biden (admitted plagiarising while writing a law school paper), Stendhal, Helen Keller, Alex Haley, Cicero, Kaavya Viswanathan (a Harvard sophomore who "wrote" How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life).

I must say that even if Wells did borrow heavily from Poe, Swift, Kipling, Stevenson, Flammarion, Rémy de Gourmont, and others, (at least he had taste!) and even if he did lift much of his Outline from Florence Deeks, and even if he did shag Lady Ottoline Morrell, I'd much rather read 10,000 of his words than 10,000 words written by Setanta. (I guess I must have just about done that during my time at A2K up to now, so, believe me, I know what I'm talking about). Wells’s wife, Jane, not only had full knowledge of his affairs but also sent 21-year-old Rebecca West her “dear love” when she gave birth to Wells’s son, Anthony.

In 1866, when Wells was born, Bromley was a town in Kent not far from London, and in 1965 it was swallowed up by the capital's expansion and became a London Borough. Working and lower middle class people living in such a place would have had an accent rather like that used by John Mills when he played the title role in the film of "The History of Mr Polly", and by, as a matter of fact, all of my mother's family, who came from Bromley and Croydon (a Surrey town which suffered a similar fate).

Do not forget that Dr. King love women and cheated on his wife not a few times as FBI tapes prove.

The only man other the Columbus that we have a national holiday in his name.

Denigrating others for the sames faults is perilously close to a tu quoque fallacy. I wasn't concerned with those others, because i was commenting on Wells. As for having read 10,000 of my words, no one held a gun to your head, you didn't have to pay for them (other than your ISP costs, which i suspect you'd have paid anyway) and i am not claiming to be a great writer. If you find it so odious to read what i write, why do you bother? Wanker.

I'd rather be a "wanker" than a pompous prat who pretends to learning he does not have.

Setanta does have quite a temper on him, but I find he does in fact generally know what he's talkiing about (at great length).

Good time travel story from the 50's, "Quit Zoomin' those Hands through the Air", by Jack Finney(as I remember it, not necessarily true in all details)

Old geezer's grandson is regaling him with stories of his dogfights in WWII. Granddad tells him to cut it out, the Civil War was still the big one, and he, the grandpa had done it all ninety years before.

He'd been wet behind the ears aide to a major who'd been a professor before the war and had invented something that was going to win the war, and they were on their way to get General Grant's blessing. Turned out the major had invented a time machine, and he figured that it was only a question of time til people invented powqered flight, so he was going to get a flying machine and win the war. He figured those first machines would be kept in the Smithsonian, so the major and the kid use the time machine to go to the Smithsonian at night, in 1950. They look thru the front door, and there's the Wright Flyer. They figure that's about their speed, so they go back to the 1860s again, walk a few feet til they'd be inside the Smithsonian, take the flyer down and back to the 1860s. the majort figures out it must run on something that will explode when fired, so they get the highest proof moonshine they can and fuel 'er up. The kid is small and light, the major is old and heavy, so the kid has to fly it. They fire it up, and the kid wobbles up and away, flies over the enemy lines and maps them so they'll know how to fight the big battle coming up. Then they return the Flyer to the Smithsonia, and go back home to the 1860s. Only thing was, the plane was unused to running on something so powerful, so it bucked and snorted and dipped and dived and veered, and the kid had sampled some of the fuel himself, and was schnockered, so he'd gotten turned around and mapped their own lines instead of the enemies, so they lost the battle and it was all for naught, and the flying machine was discredited, and nobody knew the true story of the firs airplane used in war. "So just quit zoomin' those hands thru the air, son", cause Graanddaddy did it before him and was really the first military aviator.

I wasn't speaking at great length, nor was i committing any form of blasphemy, which is what Contrex appears to think i've done.

A couple of kool New Twilight Zone time travel episodes spring to mind, both explore the theme that no matter what a time-traveller to the past might do, the past cannot be changed!

CRADLE OF DARKNESS- A German-speaking woman is sent back in time to 1889 so she can assassinate the newborn baby Hitler and prevent WW2.
http://youtu.be/cf1caeyd53Y


THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING- A guy is accidentally thrown back in time to the 1950's and hitches a ride in a truck, and the driver happens to be the young unknown Elvis Presley-
http://youtu.be/-xmU-L5wxa0